We think of tact as a little virtue — something commendable but unnecessary, a luxury of polished social interaction. But it’s far more important than that ... more »
The problems we face — environmental, political, humanitarian — are obvious. Do we still need the painstaking intellectual work of theorizing them? ... more »
Pankaj Mishra’s writing emphasizes the weight of history, but not its excitement and contingency. A bleak, fatalistic image is the result ... more »
Kafka's sentences open with a lucid idea before attempting to present its consequences, comma after unrelenting comma ... more »
Starving artists. It’s easier than ever to share your creativity with the world, but harder to make a living doing so ... more »
Modern pessimism was born on November 1, 1755, when an earthquake leveled Lisbon. A golden period of Enlightenment came crashing down with it ... more »
The Seamus Heaney experience. His gravitas and vast learning were leavened by a droll, high-spirited streak and his capacity for merriment ... more »
"Whenever they burn books," said Heinrich Heine, "they will also, in the end, burn people." A history of knowledge under attack ... more »
Punctuation and revolution. In 1905, the "Comma Strike" among Moscow's printers led to political reform. Punctuation can still make us angry ... more »
The tradition among mathematicians to name discoveries after one another is charming. It's also a colossal headache ... more »
The paradox of Graham Greene: He wrote so deftly about international politics, yet was an alarmingly unsophisticated political thinker ... more »
Tocqueville on wheels. Desert car races, like democracy, are about more than ambition counteracting ambition. Both racing and democracy require self-restraint and virtue ... more »
The policing of speech is more common than it was 15 years ago. Political correctness has run amok, says Tyler Cowen. But so then has everything else... more »
Warhol's wounds. After he was shot, in 1968, he needed a girdle to keep his innards in place. But he liked being topless. "Paint me with my scars" ... more »
We've built a politics around the idea that a college degree is a prerequisite for social esteem, says Michael Sandel. That's been corrosive to democratic life... more »
Yes, The Great Gatsby conveys grand themes and fine descriptions. But what makes it a Great American Novel? It’s really short ... more »
Time speeds up as you age, or so it seems. What's really going on is rather more complicated than that ... more »
In 1878, Mark Twain nearly outed himself as a believer in the paranormal. He thought no one would take him seriously. But was he serious? ... more »
Ayn Rand is widely reviled for her ideology. But was she also a terrible writer? Not exactly. Sometimes she was even a halfway good one ... more »
Conversation among New Yorkers can seem less like a discussion than a verbal wrestling match. Can a sociolinguist explain? Fuhgeddaboutit... more »
What Joseph Brodsky was able to set in motion: "Not the limits of a meager idea, but the activity of thought itself." ... more »
Silicon Valley is a strange place, and Jaron Lanier occupies an even stranger place within it ... more »
For a moment, London's Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a new kind of thinking was possible ... more »
Books are more permanent than magazine articles. So why are only the latter subjected to fact checking? ... more »
To express life in a concentration camp, imprisoned Jews created a new musical genre: lager-lieder... more »
A novelist’s work is solitary, and it’s a job that tends to attract misanthropes. Zadie Smith is an exception ... more »
More than 1,000 movies and TV shows have used Wagner's music. Alex Ross dissects a century of Wagner's baleful influence on Hollywood... more »
Lucian Freud at work. When a painting neared completion, he would step back and, “as though taunting himself,” murmur, “How far can you go?” ... more »
Ever since Frédéric Chopin's premature death, in 1849, people have foisted on him their own fantasies and desires, some more lurid than others ... more »
Much of Frank Ramsey’s work was unfinished when he died in 1930, at age 26. But philosophers still find that their own insights have already been articulated by him... more »
“After one finishes a story, one should cross out the beginning and the end," said Chekhov. "It is there that we writers lie most of all” ... more »
When Ralph Ellison got to New York, age 23, he kept copies of his letters. He was writing himself into history ... more »
John Cheever took no interest in theology. But his keen spiritual sense had a definite tendency... more »
After 50, Gore Vidal said, litigation replaces sex. He would be proud of his posthumous legal legacy... more »
How did we go from the techno-utopianism of the ’90s to the digital cesspool we’re left with today? A new book explains ... more »
Olavo de Carvalho, a 73-year-old right-wing autodidact, is on a mission: He wants to become the Brazilian Gramsci... more »
The tyranny of chairs. For most of history, humans would squat or lie down for stationary activities. Now we’re captive to poorly designed seats... more »
The least read masterpiece of 20th-century thought? Carlo Michelstaedter’s Persuasion and Rhetoric, overlooked in part because the author killed himself at 23... more »
Thinking through the pandemic. Ours is a bleak reality, full of social and personal uncertainty. And so we return to existentialism... more »
Satirized, pranked, mocked — even pelted with garbage — the Victorian poet William McGonagall was famous for his terrible art... more »
Boredom has been around since modernity, and now boredom studies is a thriving field. Can its scholars tell us anything new? ... more »
Why we hoard. Stuff attracts more stuff, and accumulation has a powerful logic rooted in history and biology ... more »
The apotheosis of Brutalism, that megalomaniacal overreach beloved of architects and dictators, was in 1920s Moscow. Is it having a retro moment?... more »
The literature of white liberalism. In books like White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist, white people try to read their way out of trouble. Does that work?... more »
Tolstoy’s hobbies included drinking copious amounts of fermented mare’s milk, penning vociferous calls for agrarian reform, and learning ancient Greek... more »
We think linearly, in terms of cause and effect. But the world is an object lesson in complexity... more »
People have made countless attempts to train animals to speak our language. Maybe we should learn to speak theirs... more »
Philosophers like Dietrich von Hildebrand sought to distinguish moral values from aesthetic values. Does such a question still resonate?... more »
Over 25 years, almost every book and map of value vanished from the Carnegie Library. How did the thief pull it off?... more »
Beware the reflexivity trap — the notion that awareness of a fault absolves one of that fault. It is rampant in millennial fiction... more »
Humans are social animals, and yet we sometimes need to disappear. For inspiration on how best to do that, consider the vampire squid... more »
Isaac Stern’s genial personality was well-suited for television. But the violinist was no mere crowd-pleaser... more »
Lead was not turned into gold, and astrology got us nowhere — what such magical impulses reveal is that the mind cannot bear too much reality... more »
Does republishing George Eliot as Mary Ann Evans "reclaim" her lost female identity? No, it misses the point of writing pseudonymously... more »
The life of an amanuensis: endless transcribing, discretion regarding personal life, writing lessons on the side... more »
There was no better chronicler of white guilt than William Faulkner. It was his literary strength — and his moral failing... more »
Cancel culture is a new term, but the ideological coercions of the left are not. Paul Berman offers a history lesson... more »
The medieval university duopoly. From 1334 to 1827, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge swore an oath not to teach elsewhere... more »
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. So held Paul Valéry, endless tinkerer, perfectionist, and pain to his publisher... more »
Academia is a hotbed of proliferating identities and packaged narratives. But a person is not an identity... more »
Before Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, Dave Brubeck was the name most likely to start an argument among jazz fans... more »
In the face of tyranny, most join the oppressors or remain silent. A few resist. This is the story of Berlin's intellectuals... more »
How should historians approach the here and now? As a rule, they are wary of “presentism.” But that’s changing... more »
We think of tact as a little virtue — something commendable but unnecessary, a luxury of polished social interaction. But it’s far more important than that ... more »
Kafka's sentences open with a lucid idea before attempting to present its consequences, comma after unrelenting comma ... more »
The Seamus Heaney experience. His gravitas and vast learning were leavened by a droll, high-spirited streak and his capacity for merriment ... more »
The tradition among mathematicians to name discoveries after one another is charming. It's also a colossal headache ... more »
The policing of speech is more common than it was 15 years ago. Political correctness has run amok, says Tyler Cowen. But so then has everything else... more »
Yes, The Great Gatsby conveys grand themes and fine descriptions. But what makes it a Great American Novel? It’s really short ... more »
Ayn Rand is widely reviled for her ideology. But was she also a terrible writer? Not exactly. Sometimes she was even a halfway good one ... more »
Silicon Valley is a strange place, and Jaron Lanier occupies an even stranger place within it ... more »
To express life in a concentration camp, imprisoned Jews created a new musical genre: lager-lieder... more »
Lucian Freud at work. When a painting neared completion, he would step back and, “as though taunting himself,” murmur, “How far can you go?” ... more »
“After one finishes a story, one should cross out the beginning and the end," said Chekhov. "It is there that we writers lie most of all” ... more »
After 50, Gore Vidal said, litigation replaces sex. He would be proud of his posthumous legal legacy... more »
The tyranny of chairs. For most of history, humans would squat or lie down for stationary activities. Now we’re captive to poorly designed seats... more »
Satirized, pranked, mocked — even pelted with garbage — the Victorian poet William McGonagall was famous for his terrible art... more »
The apotheosis of Brutalism, that megalomaniacal overreach beloved of architects and dictators, was in 1920s Moscow. Is it having a retro moment?... more »
We think linearly, in terms of cause and effect. But the world is an object lesson in complexity... more »
Over 25 years, almost every book and map of value vanished from the Carnegie Library. How did the thief pull it off?... more »
Isaac Stern’s genial personality was well-suited for television. But the violinist was no mere crowd-pleaser... more »
The life of an amanuensis: endless transcribing, discretion regarding personal life, writing lessons on the side... more »
The medieval university duopoly. From 1334 to 1827, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge swore an oath not to teach elsewhere... more »
Before Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, Dave Brubeck was the name most likely to start an argument among jazz fans... more »
George Scialabba's book began as a suicide note. “I was, fortunately, too exhausted and disorganized to plan a suicide, much less compose an elegant rebuke to an uncaring world”... more »
"I’d been made a pariah," says Leon Wieseltier, "and I’ve read about pariahs all my life, so I guess I’m the wiser for it”... more »
For Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, social theory was a way to make sense of distant cultures — and a lever against your own predicaments... more »
A eulogy for the secondhand bookshop. This most eccentric and likeable of institutions shows every sign of being annihilated... more »
How Longfellow mourned his wife. He had his own grave dug at the age of 30, he traveled, and he courted an 18-year-old... more »
Bernard Bailyn, the scholar who overturned our understanding of the American Revolution, is dead at 97... more »
There’s a lot you don’t know when you see a painting online. Can that sense of mystery become part of the truth of the experience?... more »
Britain boasts a history of theater criticism that goes back to Hazlitt and Shaw. That 200-year tradition is at risk of coming to an end... more »
The socially distant art gallery: "A space of relaxation, leisure and education has become one of intense moral precarity"... more »
It’s time to end “the tyranny of words,” say some scientists, calling for brain-to-brain-interface technology. Not so fast... more »
Gayl Jones was a prodigy, hailed by Baldwin and Updike. Now she’s the best American novelist whose name you may not know... more »
Asked how she ended up with men as different as Pablo Picasso and Jonas Salk, Françoise Gilot replied: “Lions mate with lions”... more »
How do people feel when their world is falling apart? How do they salvage their lives? What do they cling to?... more »
How do people feel when their world is falling apart? How do they salvage their lives? What do they cling to?... more »
R.A. Fisher's eminence as a scientist is beyond doubt. So is the fact that he was a racist. How should the University of Cambridge remember him?... more »
Derek Walcott’s New Yorks. His were the off-Broadway scene of the '50s, the Shakespeare Festival in the ’70s, the West Village of the '90s... more »
The poet Fernando Pessoa published little, and usually under other names. Only after his death did the scope of his genius become clear... more »
Kafka and Nabokov gave great literary weight to the land-line telephone. Will mobile phones ever provide as much drama?... more »
How to be an emperor. Often portrayed as hedonistic dilettantes or paper-pushing bureaucrats, the rulers of ancient Rome were in reality something else... more »
The problems we face — environmental, political, humanitarian — are obvious. Do we still need the painstaking intellectual work of theorizing them? ... more »
Starving artists. It’s easier than ever to share your creativity with the world, but harder to make a living doing so ... more »
"Whenever they burn books," said Heinrich Heine, "they will also, in the end, burn people." A history of knowledge under attack ... more »
The paradox of Graham Greene: He wrote so deftly about international politics, yet was an alarmingly unsophisticated political thinker ... more »
Warhol's wounds. After he was shot, in 1968, he needed a girdle to keep his innards in place. But he liked being topless. "Paint me with my scars" ... more »
Time speeds up as you age, or so it seems. What's really going on is rather more complicated than that ... more »
Conversation among New Yorkers can seem less like a discussion than a verbal wrestling match. Can a sociolinguist explain? Fuhgeddaboutit... more »
For a moment, London's Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a new kind of thinking was possible ... more »
A novelist’s work is solitary, and it’s a job that tends to attract misanthropes. Zadie Smith is an exception ... more »
Ever since Frédéric Chopin's premature death, in 1849, people have foisted on him their own fantasies and desires, some more lurid than others ... more »
When Ralph Ellison got to New York, age 23, he kept copies of his letters. He was writing himself into history ... more »
How did we go from the techno-utopianism of the ’90s to the digital cesspool we’re left with today? A new book explains ... more »
The least read masterpiece of 20th-century thought? Carlo Michelstaedter’s Persuasion and Rhetoric, overlooked in part because the author killed himself at 23... more »
Boredom has been around since modernity, and now boredom studies is a thriving field. Can its scholars tell us anything new? ... more »
The literature of white liberalism. In books like White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist, white people try to read their way out of trouble. Does that work?... more »
People have made countless attempts to train animals to speak our language. Maybe we should learn to speak theirs... more »
Beware the reflexivity trap — the notion that awareness of a fault absolves one of that fault. It is rampant in millennial fiction... more »
Lead was not turned into gold, and astrology got us nowhere — what such magical impulses reveal is that the mind cannot bear too much reality... more »
There was no better chronicler of white guilt than William Faulkner. It was his literary strength — and his moral failing... more »
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. So held Paul Valéry, endless tinkerer, perfectionist, and pain to his publisher... more »
In the face of tyranny, most join the oppressors or remain silent. A few resist. This is the story of Berlin's intellectuals... more »
In the aftermath of World War I, four philosophers set about studying the same fundamental question: “What does language do to us?” They had four different answers... more »
How did a Harvard divinity scholar fall for a clumsy archaeological fraud? She had every reason to believe... more »
How to follow a perfect novel? After Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison found events conspiring against his second act... more »
“There is no way around it, talking to the Google search bar like a human generates more relevant results.”... more »
We remember the Italian Renaissance for its artistic brilliance, but it came with a dark side: slavery, rape, and slaughter... more »
Described as a “monk and ragamuffin,” Francis Poulenc was a composer who melded the incompatible... more »
In 1774, Catherine the Great ordered a piano from England. How did so many such instruments of affluence end up in Siberia?... more »
What decided the outcome of World War II? First consider the strategic delusions that afflicted Mussolini and Hitler... more »
The lure of literary reviewing. For Frank Kermode, the trouble was that once you start, you can't stop... more »
Pity the author whose book was reviewed by Jenny Diski. Her first response was to be incredulous that the work even existed... more »
Literature permits us not only to work out what we believe, but also to reflect on the nature of belief itself... more »
To be close to Stalin was to risk death. What's it like to have been in his inner circle and survived?... more »
Vivian Gornick never tired of asking the same questions or revisiting the same books. There is power in loitering on well-trod ground... more »
Who needs a worldview? For Raymond Geuss, unified visions and conceptions of truth lead us astray. Instead, we should be pragmatic... more »
The first generation of charismatic leaders. From the start, democracy internalized a new form of Caesarist temptation... more »
To think like Shakespeare, enter the Elizabethan classroom, where curiosity, intellectual agility, and rhetorical felicity were paramount... more »
Meet the Mozarts. Their collective outings were grim and their correspondence scatological. And yet the family was gloriously alive... more »
The first modern philosopher. Kierkegaard's "massive oeuvre can be read as one long, compulsive, maddening attempt to understand who he was"... more »
Pankaj Mishra’s writing emphasizes the weight of history, but not its excitement and contingency. A bleak, fatalistic image is the result ... more »
Modern pessimism was born on November 1, 1755, when an earthquake leveled Lisbon. A golden period of Enlightenment came crashing down with it ... more »
Punctuation and revolution. In 1905, the "Comma Strike" among Moscow's printers led to political reform. Punctuation can still make us angry ... more »
Tocqueville on wheels. Desert car races, like democracy, are about more than ambition counteracting ambition. Both racing and democracy require self-restraint and virtue ... more »
We've built a politics around the idea that a college degree is a prerequisite for social esteem, says Michael Sandel. That's been corrosive to democratic life... more »
In 1878, Mark Twain nearly outed himself as a believer in the paranormal. He thought no one would take him seriously. But was he serious? ... more »
What Joseph Brodsky was able to set in motion: "Not the limits of a meager idea, but the activity of thought itself." ... more »
Books are more permanent than magazine articles. So why are only the latter subjected to fact checking? ... more »
More than 1,000 movies and TV shows have used Wagner's music. Alex Ross dissects a century of Wagner's baleful influence on Hollywood... more »
Much of Frank Ramsey’s work was unfinished when he died in 1930, at age 26. But philosophers still find that their own insights have already been articulated by him... more »
John Cheever took no interest in theology. But his keen spiritual sense had a definite tendency... more »
Olavo de Carvalho, a 73-year-old right-wing autodidact, is on a mission: He wants to become the Brazilian Gramsci... more »
Thinking through the pandemic. Ours is a bleak reality, full of social and personal uncertainty. And so we return to existentialism... more »
Why we hoard. Stuff attracts more stuff, and accumulation has a powerful logic rooted in history and biology ... more »
Tolstoy’s hobbies included drinking copious amounts of fermented mare’s milk, penning vociferous calls for agrarian reform, and learning ancient Greek... more »
Philosophers like Dietrich von Hildebrand sought to distinguish moral values from aesthetic values. Does such a question still resonate?... more »
Humans are social animals, and yet we sometimes need to disappear. For inspiration on how best to do that, consider the vampire squid... more »
Does republishing George Eliot as Mary Ann Evans "reclaim" her lost female identity? No, it misses the point of writing pseudonymously... more »
Cancel culture is a new term, but the ideological coercions of the left are not. Paul Berman offers a history lesson... more »
Academia is a hotbed of proliferating identities and packaged narratives. But a person is not an identity... more »
How should historians approach the here and now? As a rule, they are wary of “presentism.” But that’s changing... more »
Susan Sontag famously wrote about Leni Riefenstahl and the aesthetics of fascism. What does an antifascist aesthetic look like?... more »
Arguments about Ezra Pound’s odious politics seem like ways to skirt the question of his literary merit. Is he any good?... more »
An allegation of systemic racism against a university is serious, says Randall Kennedy. Why is the evidence in some cases so flimsy?... more »
The mystery of the Vikings. We know of their heroism and cruelty, their riches and inequality. But their psychology remains unknowable... more »
Shame has been under scrutiny in America for more than 200 years. No emotion is at once so ubiquitous and so disputed... more »
In his work, William Faulkner could not escape the Civil War’s aftermath or its meaning. Neither can we... more »
In the 18th century, botany was a louche science. The foppish, braggadocio-prone Joseph Banks helped earn it that reputation... more »
There are many terrible books, but only one “worst novelist in the English language.” Meet Robert Burrows, the man who bore that moniker... more »
Mid-20th-century Brooklyn was full of striving, struggling immigrants. One thing set the Neugeboren family apart: The Complete Works of Charles Dickens... more »
Transfixed by his own melancholy, the literary “longing man” is a self-serious sap interested in intellectual romance. Just avoid him... more »
Gilles Deleuze’s letters reveal his ability to be clear and uncomplicated. So why is most of his writing so impenetrable?... more »
Daphne Merkin had been at work since the 1980s on a novel about erotic obsession and sexual submission. Then came the #MeToo movement... more »
Gone are the days of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Philosophers once wrote to be understood; now they write to earn academic credentials... more »
Orwell in Havana. How did 1984 come to be released in translation by a Cuban publishing house?... more »
John Giorno was sleeping with Andy Warhol, starring in his films, accompanying him to parties. Then Warhol moved on... more »
Via Joyce, Rushdie, and Franzen, the modern novel is obsessed with competition. Yet the semantics of power are difficult to trace... more »
What exactly distinguishes charismatic democratic rulers from charismatic authoritarians? As a new book reveals, the line is vanishingly thin... more »
We are witnessing a shift in how we think about free speech. Stanley Fish is an intellectual godfather of this moment... more »
E.M. Forster’s funeral was an odd affair. Religion was banned, Beethoven piped in, the procession of cars was halted when a Rolls-Royce got stuck... more »
Intellectual life is beset by a climate of censoriousness and self-censorship; Twitter gets the final say. Thomas Chatterton Williams explains the Harper’s letter... more »
“The Flatterer,” “The Chatterer,” “The Coward.” Theophrastus’ character types, more than 2,000 years old, are readily recognizable today... more »
Will Self has seen the future, and it's not pretty: increasing virtualization zooming us toward mass neuroticism in a ghastly synergy of fetishism and frigidity... more »
Michael Walzer has leftist friends who regard consumerism as a capitalist vice and shopping as an activity to be avoided. But he is a shopping man... more »
What’s the difference among a gadget, a thingamabob, a doohickey, and a gimmick? The last one promises more and perhaps delivers less... more »
The unpopularity of new smells. In 1657 a London barber was prosecuted for making “a liquor called ‘coffee’’ whose scent caused a “great nuisance” in the area... more »
Before “prestige” TV, the medium was considered the “idiot box.” With new shows like Floor Is Lava, the pendulum is swinging back again... more »
The plight of the plague specialist. As a pestilence once again rains down on humanity, what good is literary expertise in disease and disaster?... more »
What is this cancel culture? Is it even a real thing? It's complicated, says Ross Douthat, who offers a guide to the perplexed... more »
Irving Fisher and the quantification of everything. The economist died in 1947, but he anticipated the temper of our own times... more »
New material is added to Arts & Letters Daily six days a week.
Our motto, "Veritas odit moras," is found at line 850 of Seneca's version of Oedipus. It means "Truth hates delay."
Founding Editor (1998-2010): Denis Dutton
Editor: Evan Goldstein
Managing Editor: Tran Huu Dung
Assistant Editor: David Wescott
Copy Editor: Mitch Gerber
© 1998 — 2020
Arts & Letters Daily is brought to you by
The Chronicle of Higher Education